Notes on the Revelations of an Unknown Dissident
by honeyblood
Summary: Post 'Falling': Faith and Bosco have a conversation. Faith and Fred have a lack of one. Reposted.
1. revelations

"Notes on the Revelations of an Unknown Dissident"

[a third watch story]

By Darkwaters.

- - - 

"To whom, my lord? with whom? how am I false?"

_            'desdemona; act IV, scene ii, line 41'_

_            --othello, shakespeare_

"We dance round in a ring and suppose,

But the Secret sits in the middle and knows."

_            'the secret sits'_

_            --robert frost_

"**Silence (s**i**[CA1] -lens) _n. stillness; quietness; calm; refraining from speech; muteness; dumbness; secrecy; oblivion; --__interj. be quiet!: --__v.t. to cause to be still; to forbid to speak; to hush; to calm; to refute; to gag; to kill. --_****si'lent _a. free from sound or noise; indisposed to talk; unpronounced, as a vowel or consonant. [L. __silentium]."_**

_            'definition of silence'_

_            --webster's home and office dictionary_

- - -

            She has heard silence described as a bottomless pit, or as a drowning, or as a subtle death. She's heard about silences—lifeless, still things that sucked you into them like black holes; that pulled you down in the undercurrent of whitewater riptides. This, she knows, is a lie. Silences are not like still pools, she thinks; they're like cling-wrap. They're like sticky spun sugar, or better yet, taffy; they are soft and oh-so saccharin (they stick and cling and work their way under the skin and lie, lie, lie). But the silence, she thinks, is better than talking. If they talk, things might get said that are better left unsaid. 

            _Can I talk to you?_

            This is what she knows as she moves around the kitchen in the pearlized gray morning light. She pulls down three ceramic bowls with blue strips and places them on the table with several cereal boxes and a jug of milk. The milk is half empty she notes, and files it away for later in the back of her mind (butter, tampons, cheese, bread, and now milk; she tallies it up in her head and frowns, shrugs, and makes sure to remember them for later, after shift). She places spoons by the bowls and glasses by the spoons. A pitcher of berry punch sits by the milk. One of the bowls has a crescent-shaped chip on its rim, marring the smooth circle of the lip. The cartoon faces on the cereal boxes grin maniacally at her and she calls the children for breakfast, staring absently at the box, wondering why it bothers her.

            Charlie comes first, blinking and yawning, not yet quite awake. He still has his PJ's on—the red ones with the gangly cowboy puppet from Toy Story on them—and he hasn't brushed his hair yet. He pours his cereal, something sugary and brown, and dribbles some milk on it; Charlie doesn't like milk and tries to get away with drinking the absolute minimum he can of it. She doesn't make him pour more milk into his cereal this morning, which he takes heart from and, daringly, adds more brown-colored sugar balls to his bowl. His eye dart to her face, but she says nothing. She thinks; he might as well just eat them from the box, but there is no sourness in her thoughts. She is calm, and lying, lying, lying. To whom, she isn't sure.

            _I—I need to talk to you._

            She, herself, doesn't have cereal. She opens the refrigerator and pulls out a cup of yogurt randomly. It's vanilla, and as she pulls the foil off it sounds like ripping skin: moist and sharp. She rummages in a drawer for a spoon with one hand while she lays the sticky foil on the counter carefully with the other. The crinkled silver is covered in a sheen of milky yogurt. It reminds her, oddly, of mucus. She can feel Charlie looking at her—scrutinizing her—but she ignores him, and stares out the window over the sink. It's barely light out; the sky is a smudged oil pastel sketch—all soft edges and blurred lines, runny and melting like an ice-cream cone on a hot day. Its layered, wavy line upon wavy line, piled haphazardly from the angry pink of the horizon up. She thinks of sediment, and the walls of the Grand Canon. 

            The color flows, jaggedly, from bottom to top. First thin, thread-like pink ripping raggedly along the rim of the sky: binding the seam of the world. Then that swirling pearly-pink gray that you see in the cusp of oyster shells; then gray, true deep gray, like the sharp wings of a dove; then slate gray; slate blue; then blue gray, and smoky yellow; gray white; peach; a strange gray-aqua, almost green; violet slate (almost silver); charcoal; pale blue-white, like milk; smoke gray (so pale and insubstantial, it's almost not there); smoke blue; and then, finally, peacock—rich and thrumming with color, and arcing over the blackened city spires like a far-flung cloak. Her face is reflected back to her in the windowpane. Wide-jawed, high-cheeked, long-mouthed, large-eyed, all transparent, all rimmed in palest pinkie-blue (redder, though, at her cheeks). The kitchen lights back-lighting her outline her face, and she sees her countenance as both open and empty, and full and closed at the same time. This disturbs her and she wonders about the paradox of the idea. She wonders if she's seeing only what she wants to see. She wishes she could ask Fred (as she always has before, but—somehow—can't now), and the fleeting thought of asking Bosco rambles through her mind, and stumbles over her thought of asking Fred. And suddenly it's all she can do just not to burst into tears. 

She turns away, blind, from the wide-eyed image in the streaky window pane and inward to the kitchen cupboards, fingers searching mole-like for glasses before remembering that she has already put them out. 

            _Please, Faith, oh God please talk to me._

            She hears Emily in the bathroom, and looks faintly concerned towards the clock. Emily, of late, takes too much time in the bathroom before she goes to school. There have been times when Emily has made all of them (or sometimes only some of them) late. She has also been perturbed about her daughter's mode of dress recently; it was too adult, too un-Emily. The mother in her rebels against popular sex-kittenish look her daughter has adopted, just as the prepubescent in Emily feels the need to rebel against the values her mother tries to imprint on her. She ascribes it to a teenage-hormonal thing and prays that she's right, not sure she can handle this Emily for the rest of her life. She puts a spoonful of the sweetly bitter tasting yogurt in her mouth and sucks on the spoon, moving her tongue around the small, smooth, scoop of metal, pulling it against her teeth and savoring the coppery metallic taste it leaves behind, like blood.

             Emily walks into the kitchen, sullen and defiant and proud in turns. The young girl is wearing a skinny magenta shirt that clings unattractively to her young body, straining over the small, hard knots of her maturing breasts. Emily is still at that awkward stage, between child, girl, and woman, where she can afford to not wear a bra, but it is still apparent that she is no longer an '_it.' Low-riding jeans complete the outfit, revealing a line of (far too much, she thinks in dismay) milky-pink flesh between shirt-bottom and jeans-waist. The clothes, by themselves, might have been mild enough that she would have let it pass if only for the reason that she dearly didn't want to speak. But Emily had clearly been feeling a greater need than usual to defy her mother. She'd smeared her lips with bright cherry-red, and outlined her eyes with black, black kohl. It made those oh-so familiar heavy-lidded eyes into something bordering on obscene in someone so young. Had Emily been older, she would have called those dark-rimmed eyes, bedroom eyes. Emily looks at her mother with something so flat in eyes that are shaped so much like her own, and colored in Fred's honest brown, that it's disconcerting, and she has to look away. Emily tilts her chin up, and gives a glare of half triumph, half fear, and all rage. Emily, she knows, is old enough to understand what has happened, despite the fact that she herself wasn't entirely sure what it has happened. And Emily knows that her mother doesn't know._

            _I just thought we'd—I dunno. I should go._

            This, unlike Charlie's gentle rebellion of sugar, cereal, and milk, is something that she cannot ignore. She sucks once more on her spoon, then places it back in her yogurt, and makes a fluttering movement with her hands. She detests unnecessary gestures in others when speaking, and loathes that she is reduced to them. It takes her a moment to find her voice and then her words.

            "Take that junk off," (one of her hands flits softly to her own face, light touching her own lips and eyes which are tingling in sympathy to her daughter's, pantomiming what she is talking about) "All of it. You're not going to school like that." Emily's face pales and tightens with rage, contort with fury—the girl's eyes flashing brightly with something else as well, but she hesitates to name it—and Emily leaps up from the table and stalks into the bathroom. Fred emerges just as Emily slams the bathroom door. Charlie is staring at her silently, thoughtfully, catches her looking at him and looks away.

            Fred shakes his head, like a dog coming out of water or, better yet, like a bear. She thinks this is an accurate analogy; Fred is like a bear. He gives off the feeling of height and compact power without actually being tall, or powerful. He is thick—thick muscles: thick flesh: thick features. She looks at his shoulders, his short, powerful neck and the square set of his jaw, and thinks; _like a bear, just like a bear._ Her partner is wiry and lithe. Bosco has a swimmer's build, with a long, lightly muscles neck and broad, sloping shoulders. For some very odd reason, Bosco has always reminded her of an otter, long and sleek and brown. She remembers that, when she was young, a child, she had been afraid of bears. She remembers with abrupt clarity that she has always like otters, though. They had been her favorite exhibits at the Zoo. Fred looks at her and thinks, with a sudden irrationality, that she hopes he doesn't know what she's thinking. She looks at him slightly off-center, slightly over his shoulder, slightly above his head. Not at him.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I just needed— 

He stares at her, then, like she is something strange and new and, irritated, she wants to tell him to stop, to—_take a picture; it will last longer._ Instead she turns to the sink, reaching for the sponge before dropping her hand back to the counter, then reaching out again (for a water jug this time), and waters the African violets on the window ledge. There is something that feels suspiciously like a lump in her throat, and she is careful to keep her eyes on her hands. She hears the bathroom door open, and then Charlie gets up from his seat. He puts his bowl in the sink by her wrists and pads from the room to dress. She can hear Emily behind her clearly; her movements are stiff with fury. Fred does not move at all, and she feels heat creep up her neck, and is angry that it should, and wonders why.

            "I'll drop the kids off Faith," Fred says flatly. His voice is a thick, gelatinous substance; transparent should anyone care to look through it. But when Fred feels any really strong emotion, his voice drops, goes level, and does not react. It become opaque; like stone; like shale. He controls it with an iron fist and in return it becomes careful, like he's thinking about every word before he says it. Like every word is costly. Faith raises her eyes to his, stricken, ashen: shaky in her skin. _Why_ forms like a wail, like a lamentation, in the back of her throat and dies still born on her lips. Her hands flutter by her sides, because for the first time in her life she is uncertain what to do with them, and she almost reaches for him—to shake him, to hit him, to hold him; she isn't sure. Emily leaves the room to get her coat, shoes, and bag. She leaves her dishes on the table; cereal half eaten, juice half drunk. She stares at Fred and he stares back. 

            _I—Can I talk to you?_

            "Thanks," Faith says. "I'll pick up the groceries before I come home."

- - - 

            Faith stands in the frozen goods isle, between the butter and the milk, in front of the yogurt section. One hand taps the handlebar of the grocery wagon; short, rounded nails making a clipped tattoo. _Tat, rata, tataratat, rata, tat. She is meditating between yogurt brands and types, thinking that Charlie won't eat yogurt, Emily doesn't really care, and Fred only eats stirred. She likes the kind that comes with the fruit syrup on the bottom of the cup, thick and bittersweet and waiting to be stirred, but nobody else will eat it. She chews on her thumbnail, and stops. She reaches out to the stirred yogurt, and stops again._

            _They were falling, and falling; they wouldn't stop falling._

            She says softly; "fuck it," and she reaches for the non-stirred yogurt—strawberry; raspberry; blackberry; blueberry. She picks out twenty: five of each. She hesitates, then throws some vanilla and banana in the wagon as well. She stiffens her spine and feels heat creep up her throat and suffuse her cheeks. She feels as if everybody is staring at her, but knows that no one is, and she makes her way round the store for the rest of her items (coffee grounds, tampons, butter, cheese, bread, milk), and then heads to the check-out line. 

            It's late—about nine—and the line is short. There is nobody behind her. She looks at the magazines in the racks as she waits for her turn. She looks at the glossy covers with their air-brushed models on them and thinks foolishly, belatedly, of her Emily, and Faith wishes she could blind her to these magazines and protect her from their articles on perfect bodies; perfect outfits; perfect boyfriends and sex. Unconsciously, Faith touches her own hair, twists a short strawberry-ash strand around her index finger, then tugs, and wonders if _she_ looked more like one of those models that then her daughter would listen to her. Faith hopes not; hopes her daughter has a better character than that, and she moves up in the line. She catches the title of one magazine article that declares in fuchsia; "How to Know If Your Spouse is CHEATING On You," and she quickly looks away, flushing. Faith is angry; she has done nothing, why the shame? _She has done nothing._ Then, red with shame and anger in liberal parts, she deliberately turns back to the magazine and snatches it up, tosses it in the cart quickly; acts as if it burns her hands.

            _Yeah I was mad; I was gonna talk to you, just not then. You didn't give me a chance._

            The cashier smiles blankly at her; mouth grinning, gaping, red and ragged like a torn bit of tissue paper. It's a slash of fire engine red across the blotchy, scabby, pockmarked landscape of face. She is in her early twenties (Faith thinks, but is not sure) though there is something about her that might make one think she is closer to forty. The cashier's eyes are deep-set smudges of gray and black, neither young nor old nor anywhere in-between. Her brittle, child-like fingers are laden with chunky silver rings, most likely Mexican. Her teeth are stained faintly yellow from tobacco and booze, and she rings in Faith's purchases with familiar brisk efficiency, never pausing (not over the thirty cans of yogurt nor the magazine) while Faith feels her breath stick stubbornly in her throat, rages that it should, thinks that she should put the magazine back, but can't because the cashier is looking at her, smile fixed, hand poised over the gently humming register as she waits for the bill to process.

            "Paper or plastic?" She asks, heavy fingered hands resting lightly in front of her. Faith stares at her, befuddled; feels like she has just come up from being underwater, she breathes—gasps for language.

            _You didn't give me a chance._

            "Paper?" The girl repeats, drumming her fingers once, restlessly. "Or plastic?" Faith sees this and, startled, images of so many other girls like this cascade through her mind, crash through her thoughts, whirling, spinning; turning over like the fragments of scenes from a kaleidoscope and then stops and refocuses on Emily. Emily: with her black-ringed eyes and red-slashed mouth, like a damaged hibiscus, crimson and garish.

            _I'm sorry, Jesus Faith, I'm sorry; they just kept falling._

            "Paper or—" The cashier begins again, calling out the phrase singsong; repeating it like a parrot. 

            "Plastic," Faith interrupts quickly. The cashier nods, smile fixed; eyes empty—listless, and starts to bag the groceries, and, oddly, Faith feels that she has just said the wrong thing.

- - - 

            Faith lies in bed, on her side, in the dark. Fred is asleep beside her, lying still, on his back. He releases soft, gravely gasps, almost snores, and does not move. He sleeps with a guardedness that he did not have even two nights ago. The magazine and its titillating, shameful articles lies like a hidden sin in her underwear drawer. She hasn't looked in it since she bought it. When she got home and unpacked the groceries, she felt supremely stupid for having purchased the superficial thing. She had quickly put it out of sight, and tried to forget about it. 

Can I talk to you? 

She can't sleep; doesn't want to sleep. It's an accumulation of things, she knows. She sits up. Faith looks back at Fred. He, as if sensing her gaze on him, turns over, and Faith looks away; looks straight ahead at the dark blur of the wall and feels some odd uneasiness in her throat. It coils like a necklace of gilded lead around her neck, resting solidly on her collarbone. She pulls a loose knitted wrap from the bedside chair, shrugs it over her shoulders, and quietly leaves the room.

            Emily had been in her room by the time she'd returned home; Charlie had already been put to bed as well. Faith had stood over her son and stared down at him, down at his face and the pale, strawberry-gold hair that stuck to his sleep-flushed forehead in clumps of blushing platinum. She'd had the urge to lie down next to him, and curl up around his diminutive body like a huge blanket, but there was a residual feeling of filth that clung to her—a nagging feeling of unworthiness—so she'd just touched his hair. She'd brushed his sleep-flushed cheek with the tips of her fingers; the calluses of her hands (deep, tough, grooves worn into her skin by work and time) catching on the fine, invisible, baby-hairs that littered the rouge apple of his cheek, and backed out his bedroom door. 

            She remembers wanting to do the same to Emily; remembers wanting to allay some of the thoughts that have been buzzing around in her head as she'd stood silently outside her daughter's door. She'd wanted to stand over Emily and see the child that she knows her daughter to still be, no matter how hard she fought it or how much she knew. She instead now stands leaning against the doorframe of Emily's door, remembering the earlier thrum of the angry music pulsing through the door, through her bones. Faith feels tired suddenly; tired of Emily; tired of Charlie (she feels a faint twinge of guilt); tired of Fred; tired of Bosco—tired of herself.

            _Good God Faith, I didn't know what to do. I was scared._

            She pushes herself up from Emily's doorframe and goes into the living room. The living room is small, and it opens into the kitchen, which is also small. For moment she mourns for the kitchen and living room she lost; she mourned the same thing the moment she got up from the Sergeant's test knowing that she had lost it with the failing of the test. But it was a passing grief and she had moved on; forced herself to move on. The Sergeant's position would have given her family so much, she thinks, but she lets it go because there is nothing else that she can do. She knows, on some level, that she blames Bosco for it—not for failing the test so much as for causing the wish in herself that she would not pass it. And that _is Bosco's fault, regrettably, she thinks staring around the living room. That is Bosco's fault._

            _I need—I need to talk to you._

            She casts her mind back a night to Bosco weeping brokenly on her couch; his face crumpled and blanched with terror as well as tears, encircled firmly within the circumference of her arms while he shakes and burrows into her sweater-clad shoulder. It surprises her that he chose to break down in front of her; not that she _minds, oh no, Faith hastily adds mentally. Bosco is her partner. He is supposed to come to her with his troubles; he is supposed to talk to her. It promotes a healthy partnership (or so says the Chief), but things have been bad between them for so long that it'd surprised her when she opened her door and found him standing wide-eyed in her doorway alcove. They'd talked. They'd had to. What else could they, could _she_, do? He'd cried, bawled really; wept like a terrified newborn, and with (only a little hesitation) she'd held him to her. And then, afterwards, after all the terror, all the tears, all the fury and hurt and guilt had been aired (and she'd thought, Faith remembers suddenly, of the line from Macbeth's final soliloquy; full of sound and fury and signifying _nothing_), she'd made coffee._

_I'm sorry, I'm sorry._

But it wasn't '_nothing'_, and that was what had been bothering her, Faith thinks clearly in the darkling hours. _It had not been nothing._ But it should have been, oh it should have been. She still remembers the look she'd seen on Fred's face over the fragile curve of Bosco's shuddering back. More though, she remembers the feel of Bosco's hair against the skin of her chin and cheek—soft, thick and just slightly springy; like it wanted to twist into fat velvet curls. It had reminded her of an animal's pelt. He had smelt of salt and defeat. Fred had looked so—what, she asks herself wonderingly, sliding her cooling hands around her neck, tugging at the wisps of pale hair at the base of her skull.

Fred had looked so what? She asks herself. So what? It was a paradox; it was a rhetorical question, and, suddenly, she finds that she doesn't care. Sitting shivering in the big, lumpy armchair, Faith finds that she doesn't care what Fred felt, what Fred still feels, what Fred thought, what Fred still thinks; and that in itself angers her because she thinks that she _should care. It troubles her because she knows she should. She doesn't, but she thinks she should. _She knows she should._ Fred exhausts her. He's like a small child (she thinks in the privacy of her mind), always taking and taking and taking—though there __are times when, like a very young child, he will give up something and then act as if he has just made the greatest sacrifice of all. That is why she should care; he needs her. Not in the way that Bosco needs her, she thinks in tired, muddled relief, but he needs her nonetheless, and she resents him for it._

So what? _So what? So __what? __So what?_

This makes her think of Bosco again. Bosco, too, needs her; she sees evidence of it every now and again. He, unlike Fred, tries to hide his craving for comfort. She has to watch him spiral in freefall through his life, clutching at whatever precipice he can through sex and violence and control, but she sees each one crumble under his fingers before he starts falling again, and wonders when he won't be able to stop himself from falling any more, and if then, finally, he will come to her. She feels a strange sort of surety that, in the end, when he has nothing left, he will come to her. It's not something she can explain, nor is it something that she wants to examine too closely, for fear that what she finds will be too big, too, too _complicated, too much for her to deal with, and then she'll have to confront it, whatever the cost. And in the deepest recesses of her heart she knows that the cost will be great—perhaps too great. She sighs, presses her hands over her cheeks, feels the fine hairs like warm peach-fuzz against the hardened skin of her palms, slides them up over her eyes, and hides from herself. She laughs into her skin, and it is not a happy sound._

            _I need—I dunno. Faith, I—_

            She lets herself fall limp on the chair; drapes herself like a piece of wet lace across the age-muted brocade of the armchair, and pretends that she will slip through the cracks of the material like a particle of dust. She is waiting, blind, for something to happen; for something to change, to explode; to implode—she is waiting for the sky to fall about her ears and she doesn't know what to do about it.

            And she isn't at all sure that she really wants to do anything about it either.

            She huddles into her chest. She laughs again, and, again, it is not a happy sound. She cradles her forehead in her hands, lacing her fingers in a lattice of flesh and blood and bone across her brow. She sighs. She stands, and, without pausing, she moves fluidly, purposefully, into the kitchen.

The linoleum is chilly against the coarse skin of her feet. It feels as smooth and fresh as water on the rough, thickened flesh of her soles. Faith stops in the middle of the kitchen floor, suddenly unsure what it is she is doing, and she bites her lip, wraps her arms around her middle and stares around the room. It's foreign to her suddenly, alien. She sees the violets on the window ledge, and the dish-wrack by the sink, and the tattered gray tea-towels hanging from the stove handle, and the wineglasses glinting sharply from the back of the shelf, right behind the mugs and plastic cups; and she has that sudden, horrible sense of unfamiliarity that strikes like lightening, like déjà vu, at odd moments in the lost vistas of the day. It feels like she has been displaced; transported suddenly and against her will to another universe, and she realizes that it's been that way since she held her partner while he wept. Faith's hands fly to her face, resting against the blood-flushed flesh of her cheeks in slender sheaths of cool bone and skin, and she feels her throat swell. A jolt crawls down her spine, sinking claws in every second vertebra, and she feels like she's drowning.

_She remembers the hard, taunt feel of Bosco's body against hers. _

I'm sorry, I'm sorry; Faith I— 

Between her lips comes her breath—a hiss. She has the urge to start to tiptoe and be furtive, like a thief, and this gives her the impulse to laugh wildly, hysterically. She can see it now. _Why yes Chief: I was the one sneaking about my house this morning. No, no, I wasn't trying to break in—I was having a moment of extreme déjà vu_. She imagines Fred speaking against her, committing her, thick face contorted in florid disbelief and fury and chagrin at having his wife, an officer herself, arrested. What she pretends she doesn't see, even in her imagination, is the relief, the _triumph_ in her husband's face, and the resounding knowledge that _he was right_. 

_Can I talk to you?_

It troubles her that she is so bent on proving him, not so much _wrong_, as not _right_. Faith tries not to dwell on this and pulls a cup down from the shelf above the sink and goes to the fridge. One of Charlie's drawings is on it: a crayon scribble of his family. She looks at it and sees Emily standing close to Fred, with herself slightly apart from them. Charlie, himself, is in the middle, smiling his huge, black, waxy crayon grin, and, Faith sees with a jolt, Bosco is standing just a little behind her, but close to her; an unskilled mirror of Emily and Fred's pose. She swallows, trembles, opens the fridge door, pulls out some milk and then turns away from the fridge and the picture. Faith pours the milk into the cup. Charlie, she knows, knows nothing but that Daddy is upset; apparently with Mommy, and that they aren't getting a big new house. _He doesn't know anything._

_I need—Faith, please. _

But there is nothing for him _to_ know, she thinks wildly, heart beating frantically at its cage of blood and bone and fine violet veins. _There is nothing to know._ She is angry she should be so concerned that Charlie might know _something_ when there is _nothing_ to know. She is upset that she even thought of it in the first place. She is upset because now a part of her must think: _is there something_? And she doesn't want to answer that question.

Faith takes a sip of her milk, grimaces and, hesitantly, leaves it on the counter. She can't rid herself of the feeling of displacement. And, strangely, some part of her doesn't want to.

_Make it stop._

She goes back into the living room, pauses on the threshold, and then heads towards her room. Inside Fred is still asleep. He does not move as she stands at the foot of the bed, and she is unexpectedly furious with him—blindly, madly, thoughtlessly furious. She wants to rip the covers off him and scream in his face, _'look at me look at me look at me!'_ And this doesn't make any sense to her because she doesn't know what she wants him to look at. The vicious, wistful thought, _Bosco would_, slips through her teeming brain and, shamed, she turns away. She dismisses the thought with scornful disdain (and tries to ignore the confidence she'd felt in the thought)—_would what?_ Would know what she _meant_? She doesn't even know what she meant. Would know what she wants him to see? Is there really anything for him to see, anyway? Her eyes itch, and she rubs then, ignoring the sticky dampness that they leave like snail tracks on the back of her hand.

_I want to talk to you Faith._

Faith abruptly goes over to her dresser and rummages softly through the top drawer. She touches the slick cover of the magazine she'd bought, and, with only a brief pause, she pulls it out. She stares at the gaudy cover, gleaming gently in the dusky light. Her eyes skip over all the other headings and stick on the word cheating. It scares her and repulses her and she can't look away. She rolls it in a tube and grips it with both hands; she looks around the room, skips her eyes over Fred, and heads to the bathroom.

They have two bathrooms in the apartment; one is in the hallway between the living room, kitchen and sleeping quarters. The other is attached to the master bedroom. It is about the size of a large closet. It holds a shower, a toilet and a sink; the bathtub is in the larger family bathroom. The compensation for the smaller size of the master bath is that it has a lock on the door. Faith, who has never really given it any thought before, is now suddenly grateful for the privacy this feature offers. She locks the door after her as she enters. Then she turns the cover on the toilet seat down on the milk-colored plastic lid. There is a fine sort of trembling that rushes through her veins now; it's like ice water has been poured into her heart and now flushes her extremities with chill and hoary frost. Gooseflesh is rising on her legs and forearms. She ignores the cold (both internal and ex) and focuses her complete attention on the soft magazine in her hands.

It's incongruous looking against the camp mid '70s floor tiles and the milk-blue color of her flesh; garish and out of place like a clown at a funeral. There is a spidery-legged model on the cover in a chic designer dress. Parts of her are obscured by neon font (in bold) that proclaim the various headlining articles to the world: 25 SEX MOVES to improve your sex life, how to get the BODY you really need, FALL FASHIONS for the NEW MILLENNIUM, and (this is the one that she is really interested in) how to know if your spouse is CHEATING on you. Faith licks her lips, and tries not to think about why she is doing this.

How to know if your spouse is cheating on you, page thirty-five. She turns to page thirty-five. It opens with a brief definition.

Cheating, i.e., a cheat (ch**e**t): _v.t._ To deceive; to defraud; to trick—_v.i_. to practice trickery; —_n._ a fraud; an imposture; one who cheats; an impostor. —Cheat'er _n._ [short for _escheat_] 

One who cheats.

_Faith I . . . Really need—you, right now._

_Fred looking at her over the fragile curve of Bosco's spine._

An impostor.

The article is a list of things like, "has s/he been coming home late more often," and, "does s/he take more business trips than usual lately?" Faith closes her eyes and bites down on her tongue to keep from screaming. This is not what she wants. This is not what she needs. She is relieved, in a way, but this is not want she wants. She isn't entirely certain what she wants, what she needs, but this is not it. She wants to cry. She laughs instead, and it hurts her throat and ears. She feels opaque and intangible. She likes the sound of that word, and rolls it in her head. Intangible. Faith thinks, _that isn't right_, and she looks down at her hands.

_I sat on the curb and watched them fall._

_She_ doesn't feel intangible; what she _feels_ is intangible. Faith's not entirely clear exactly what the difference between the two is, but she knows there is one. Faith stares down blindly at the magazine clutched tightly between her hands.

Adultery and infidelity were not things widely discussed in her household growing up. In fact, they wasn't discussed at all except in passing mention of someone they knew (Did you _hear_? Jane _left_ Andrew. For a _salesman_.), or thought they did. Then, in high school, there had been Fred, and no one else had ever once crossed her mind in _that_ way. And after high school, they'd married, and that was that. She'd thought that she was unbearably happy, but now Faith is forced to consider the fact that maybe she doesn't know what happiness is.

_It was terrifying._

She can remember, distantly, a time before Fred when her world had consisted of so much more than it did now. Faith thinks that she had been happy then, too, but there is far too much that she'd uncertain about now for her to be sure. She remembers once, when she was young—decades ago, Faith realizes with surprise—not being complicated. There had been her Mama (an image compiled of soap-scented lawn skirts, soft, quarrelsome voice, and cracked red skin), her Poppy (a short, supine figure with hair the color of a bloody sunrise, a swift tongue and an ever swifter hand) and that had been her entire world. Faith longs to become that simple again. She longs to make her world revolve around the uncomplicated idea of Fred and Emily and Charlie, and maybe even Bosco, to some extent. But Bosco is complicated, so he cannot be part of a simple world. And Faith is a rational adult. Faith knows that she cannot become simple because she is complicated. Like the silence is now.

The bathroom is cold. Drafts have found their way through the gaps in the aging wool of her sweater. There is a tension in the air around her that Faith hadn't been aware of before. She wraps her arms around her middle and rocks slowly, while she stares, sightlessly, at the white plaster of the wall in front of her. She thinks, if only I could speak, but the quiet has taken up residence in her throat and the words will not come.

"Faith?" Fred's voice is thick with the calluses of sleep on the other side of the door. She can picture him standing there with his hand splayed against the door, looking rumpled and tired in baggy sweats. Faith stills. She opens her mouth to say, go back to bed; I'm fine, I'm happy.

_You didn't give me a chance._

But she isn't.

- - -

Faith stands by her locker. She is putting on her shirt. For a moment she isn't sure which shirt it is; her navy work shirt, or her cotton shirt from home. This scares her because never before has she been unable to separate her job-life and her home-life. She has always made sure that there was some sort of distinction there so she would bring the problems from one into the other. But, somehow, she can't hold the two apart anymore. 

Her fingers fumble with her bag and she realizes that her sift is over; she is getting ready to go home. Her watch says that it's past midnight. Her husband and her children will be asleep in bed when she gets home.

Faith finds that she doesn't really want to go home.

Bosco comes in behind her, from the showers. His hair is wet, and it sticks to his forehead in dark clumps. His head is sleek, like the skull of an otter. He's humming softly to himself. Faith watches him from the corner of her eye. Faith thinks she should go home; that she should go right now.

But she doesn't.

Bosco is stuffing his arms into his jacket. It's an old black leather one that looks like it should belong to a biker. She doesn't know where he got it; he's had it forever. Faith quickly looks away as he starts to lock up his stuff. She realizes that she has been ready to leave for some time.

"Faith?" Bosco asks from behind her. She is staring blindly at the metal walls of her locker, hand poised on the frame. "You wanna grab a coffee with me or something to wind down?" She thinks again; I should go home.

Bosco's face is expectant; a sharp face with keen dark eyes and a square jaw. His hair is drying to a lighter shade of airy mahogany spikes. She tries not to think about his face weeping into the crook of her shoulder. She thinks she is going to refuse. She thinks she is going to go home, back to that vortex of resentful silence, and suddenly she terrified. Terrified and so very tired. Bosco acts like nothing has happen. He doesn't ignore it, but he treats it like it happens all the time. He treats it like it's something normal. Maybe it is. She doesn't know any more.

"I—I should get home, you know?" She says. Her voice sounds hoarse to her ears, like she hasn't spoken in years. Maybe she hasn't, she thinks. Maybe the silence has been there longer than she'd thought. "Fred an the kids will be in bed. I should go home." 

"But if they're all already in bed, what's an hour over coffee?" Bosco counters with a puzzled grin. She can see that he's confused, but she isn't sure what she could say to explain it to him. She isn't sure she wants to.

"Faith?" He says when she doesn't answer. It's enough to irritate Faith, and a scowl curves her lips. She knows she should go home.

"Yeah," she says, not surprised of her answer, but despairing. "Sure."

But she doesn't.

- - -

Emily and Charlie are eating breakfast. Faith is cooking eggs and bacon at the stove. Fred is in the bathroom. He has not asked her where she was last night, nor why she came home so late.

She is taking the kids to school today, and she says to them, "Eat up; you don't want to be late." She can hear Fred moving around in the bedroom.

The light outside the kitchen window is watery and warm. The sky is several shades of pearl and rose, layer upon layer arcing over the city spires; Faith thinks that it looks like rain. She stirs the eggs and moves some of the bacon to a plate.

"Take a rain coat," she tells Emily and Charlie. "You may need it today." 

Faith moves about the kitchen restlessly. She rinses some of the dishes in the sink and puts them in the wrack. She grabs some fruit from the fruit bowl and looks in the fridge for some lunch food. She can feel Emily's eyes boring into the back of her skull. She wants to say stop it.

Faith tries to concentrate on making sandwiches. She pulls ham, mayonnaise, mustard, pickles, lettuce, and cheese out of the fridge. She also gets out peanut butter because Charlie doesn't like cheese sandwiches. She spreads out the food on the counter, and then turns back to the stove. 

She stirs they eggs again, then says in a mock drawl that thrills him, "Back your cart up Charlie. D'you want ketchup with 'em?" Charlie holds out his plate and Emily looks away. Emily, apparently, doesn't eat eggs anymore. But she does grab a piece of bacon. Faith turns off the burner and starts to make sandwiches: peanut butter and lettuce for Charlie, ham and cheese for Emily, and, hesitantly, a ham sandwich for Fred. She spreads the mayonnaise carefully, remembering that Fred doesn't like cheese.

Fred comes out of the bedroom and into the hall. She can hear him searching through the hall closet for his jean jacket.

"Your coat—the jean one? It's hanging on the chair in the living room," Faith calls out after a moment. "By the mirror." She hears Fred grunt, and he moves into the kitchen. She moves back to the stove for a moment to shovel the last few pieces of bacon onto a plate. Emily gets up from the table and leaves the room. Charlie is eating the last handful of egg on his plate, covered in copious amounts of ketchup. Fred opens the fridge and then closes the door. He looks, briefly, out the window. She takes a deep breath.

"So," she says carefully, studiously looking down at the frying pan. "Are we okay now?" She feels Fred still behind her. He half turns to her. She twists to look at him. Fred is standing in front of the window and she can see a transparent sickle of moon hanging just above the horizon, belly scraping the city top.

"I don't know." He says quietly. "Are we?" Charlie is slurping back his orange juice. His hand darts for the last piece of bacon on the plate. He looks pleadingly at the frying pan. Faith, distracted, stares after Fred as he moves out of the kitchen. She doesn't know what to say. She feels stupid and cruel and terrible.

And in that moment, Faith knows that she loves Fred, and that she hates Fred, and she isn't sure she can live without him, but she isn't sure she can live with him either. She isn't certain that she wants to be without him, and she isn't certain that she would know how to be without him. She puts down the frying pan and turns the burner off. The front door closes, and she feels her eyes are sore. Faith turns back to counter and the sandwiches. She finishes Emily's and Charlie's and puts Fred's back in the fridge. 

"Go get dressed," she tells Charlie. He nods, slips down from his chair, and leaves the room. Faith rests her hands on the ledge of the sink and stares out the window. She thinks she could have said something, and wonders what it could have been. She pretends that she knows what she should have said.

"Are you driving us?" Emily asks from behind her. Faith can see her face in the streaky glass of the window. It's gray and tired. She can see Emily behind her, superposed over her own face, young, arrogant and knowing.

"Yeah," Faith says. "Your lunch is on the counter." Emily's lip curls and she can see her begin the acid of a reply about not needing a lunch.

"I'm getting dressed," she says. "We'll be out the door in ten."

- - -

Faith is in her room. She is getting dressed. She pulls on a long sleeved cotton shirt and jeans. She pulls her hair back in a low ponytail. She is ready to go. But she finds that she is also waiting. She is waiting for something to come and drive her out of the complacency that she feels mired in. She is waiting for someone to shake her and make her wake up. She is waiting for the moment when she will get up one night and get dressed, and leave as Fred watches her—as he has always been watching her—warily, waiting for the moment when she will close the door behind her. 

- - -

Disclaimer: I own nothing except the hair on my head. Literally.

Author's note:

            Not . . . bad, I guess. Well, not too bad. This, FYI, is immeaditly post "Falling" (the next morning to be precise), and directly—to the point of overlapping—pre "the Greater Good" (hopefully some of you will recognize the final scene). Now, I want to clear some things up. Firstly, the italicized lines you find sprinkled throughout the first few sections are, of course, Bosco's dialogue from "Falling" when he's talking with Faith in her living room . . . with a little judicious rewriting by yours truly (to tell the truth, I couldn't remember their exact conversation, and I couldn't find any transcripts online, so I just made it up as I went along). Secondly, I was formerly known as Ophelia, but have since changed my name to Darkwaters. And Thirdly, I want to stress that, while I am a F/B shipper, I like exploring some of the less . . . romantic angles of their relationship. Namely the fact that Faith is married, and that any feelings she could have for him would be considered unfaithful. But (and I hope that people noticed) I also tried to stress the fact that Faith was confused and anger (a bit of a twist from the norm, eh?) about those feelings. This is not finish; I repeat, not finish by any count. I have not had a chance to read over it, nor have I had a chance to show it to my Beta, so I may be periodically reposting with a more satisfactory version. But, because I am a feedback slut, I am posting for your viewing pleasure anyway. 

            Thank you for reading,

                                    D.

* * *

PAGE \# "'Page: '#'  
'"  [CA1]


	2. revelations: revisited

"Notes on the Revelations of an Unknown Dissident"

[a third watch story]

By Darkwaters.

- - -

"To whom, my lord? with whom? how am I false?"

_'desdemona; act IV, scene ii, line 41'_

_            --othello, shakespeare_

"We dance round in a ring and suppose,

But the Secret sits in the middle and knows."

_'the secret sits'_

_            --robert frost _

- - -

            "I--Can I talk to you?" Bosco stands hesitantly outside her apartment door. He's wearing that scruffy army jacket she hates, now suddenly, more than ever; it only adds to the image of bestiality he's projecting. He reminds her of pictures she once saw the only photography gallery she'd ever been in. It had been full of angry, weary, defeated, vulnerable, defiant pictures that she hadn't wanted to see again. He sounds nothing like her partner.

            "I . . . I really need to," he adds, when she doesn't answer immediately, looking ashamed. "I mean--" His tongue halts clumsily and he stuffs his hands in his pockets. "Fuck I'm bad at this," he mutters sounding more like himself. He ducks his head as if he were a schoolboy owning up to some great mischief. 

            Faith shakes herself. "I thought that you were--are--mad at me. You wouldn't talk to me." She sounds more accusatory than she thinks she ought and winces, but Bosco doesn't seem to notice. His head comes up in surprise.

            "Yeah I was mad; I was gonna talk to you, just not then." He explains nonchalantly; unconsciously, he begins to scowl at her reproachfully. "You didn't give me a chance."

            "Oh," she says not knowing what else to say.

            "Well?" He asks. Faith looks at him blankly so he adds, "Can I come in? I want to talk to you Faith."  
            "Come in," she says belatedly as she holds the door open a bit wider to admit him entrance. Her earlier fight with Fred runs through her head and she thinks that he would not want Bosco to come in. But Fred isn't home and, anyway, he can't tell her who can and cannot be in their home. As Bosco passes by her and heads towards the living room she notices a tension in his neck and shoulders she hadn't seen before in the dim hallway lighting. There is a coiling of nervous energy around his eyes. Faith closes the door and turns to find her partner prowling restlessly around the room. He hasn't removed his coat, and he can't seem to concentrate on anything for long. He pauses by the kitchen table.

            "Nice cake," he says, fingering a metal buckle on his coat. "What's it for? Wait," he frowns and glances back at her, surprised. "The Sergeant's test wasn't today was it?"

Faith can feel her mouth tightening into a grimace.

            "Yeah," she says. "I didn't pass. At least, I don't think so." Faith knows that she has not passed, but she hates having to repeat the fact. Despite this, though, it feels like some huge weight has been lifted from her shoulders. Bosco doesn't reply but stares at the cake for a moment longer. Faith takes a step away from the door. She doesn't know what makes her add, "Fred was kinda upset."

            "Oh yeah?" A part of her wonders why Bosco's interested enough to reply.

            "Yeah. Well, whatever."

            "Whatever," he echoes softly. Faith thinks she imagines the relief in his agreement.

            "The kids are in bed." She hesitates then adds, "Do you want some coffee or something?"

            "No, thanks." Bosco has wondered back into the living room. He doesn't ask after Fred. She doesn't offer again. He's standing in front of the fireplace, looking at the pictures and nick-knacks there. Faith wonders what he thinks about the photos though she doesn't dare voice her thoughts. Bosco wheels about suddenly, forcing a vague smile on his face. It lasts for maybe a minute. He starts speaking rapidly and it seems to Faith that his mouth can't keep up with his words; he's a character in a badly dubbed movie. "Look, I just thought we'd--I dunno. I should go. Sorry for bothering you." He makes a move like he is going to leave, and she strides to him; puts a hand on his arm and stops him. Under the skin of her palm, even through the thick fabric of his jacket, she can feel the muscles in his arm relax.

            "Bosco," she says, and this is both a warning and a supplication. He accedes without argument and she steers him to a seat on the couch. For an instant she wonders if she wants to hear this, whatever this is. His face is not that of her partner's, but that of the terrified youth who'd clutched at her arm while red dye soaked through his Kevlar vest and shirt, staining his skin like blood. He looks, for the first time in all the years she has known him, completely lost. 

            Faith thinks that she's suppose to know what to do, but she doesn't. So she stands and begins to go into the kitchen to make some kind of hot drink for them.

            "There were children," the dark-haired man blurts out. She stares at him, uncomprehending. "Faith, I need--I dunno. _Fuck._" He spits out the explicit with a tangled voice, seemingly furious that he can't explain himself clearly. Gold specks snap angrily in his eyes. He runs his hands through his hair. Faith just stands over him, unsure what to say or do, feeling awkward, feeling like a stranger in her own home. Then he deflates. 

            "Fuck," he repeats, but dully this time.

            "Boz," she begins. She stops there because she doesn't know what she was going to say to him. Faith rallies herself, and opens her mouth to just say _something_, but Bosco doesn't let her. 

            "I don't know," he snaps, abruptly incensed again. "_I don't fucking know._"

            She feels a thunderbolt of understanding split her skull; the all-knowing Maurice Boscorelli has no idea what's wrong with himself, and he hates it. The knowledge that she _knows buoys her for a moment, but this slightly unwholesome happiness is fleeting. After a moment, she feels awkward again. He is staring with resolute sullenness at his hands hanging limp across his knees._

            "Coffee," she mutters, wheeling back to the kitchen with an unsettled stomach. "I'll make coffee."

            "Faith, wait." She freezes in place. The note of defeat in his voice is heart-rending. "Please. I just . . . Look, I really just--need you right now." She swallows her uneasy pity with a dry mouth. When she turns back to him, all she can see are his red-rimmed, glassy eyes set in a chalk-white face.

            "They were falling," he mutters through bloodless lips. He has raised his eyes from his hands sitting docilely in his lap. He shivers as though cold. "I'm seeing that shrink," he adds, his voice shifting abruptly, and she can hear the sneer of derision steady it. Bosco is struggling to wrestle back control and it's a losing battle.

            "Yeah?" She perches on the edge of a chair near him, but not too near. She's mindful, that way. Keep your hands to yourself; keeps eye contact only; look _at_ him, not at _him_. "What's he say?"

            "The usual shit." He shrugs. "It's funny; he keeps saying that I should talk to you about everything."

            "Oh?" Then, after a heartbeat, "Why?" 

            "Hell if I know," he snorts, and he looks at her then, dark eyes darker with reproach. "I _would have talked to you."_

            "Eventually," Faith corrects him.

            "Eventually," he echoes. "But I would have. You didn't give me a chance." Faith feels like she should apologize for something here, but she can't find any adequate words or a reason why. She breaks eye contact with him by sliding her gaze over his shoulder. She doesn't want to see the unrepressed wonder she knows is in his eyes.

            That is how she first sees the shaking. It starts in his shoulders and trickles down into his chest. She has seen it too many times before to not recognize it now. But it can't be! Bosco doesn't _cry_, she thinks in disbelief. Her gaze flies to his face and--low and behold--he is blinking rapidly to contain tears, and his throat contracts while he convulsively swallows his sobs. Faith reaches out a hand to touch him, but it hovers over his arm; she can't bring herself to touch him somehow. I don't want to do this, she thinks suddenly, despairingly. Don't make me do this.

            Perhaps Bosco can feel some of her anxiety because he makes a superhuman effort to pull himself together. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he hisses out. "I just needed--" But he never finishes his thought because the tears come despite his wishes. His face crumples inward on itself and he starts crying softly.

            "I'm sorry, Jesus Faith," he hunches into himself protectively as he cries. "When I got there, the second Tower was just coming down. I'm sorry; they just kept _falling_." Then it hits her.

            "Oh Boz," she murmurs helplessly, as the magnitude of September's atrocity finally hits him. She had thought that maybe he, the super cop, had escaped unscathed from most of the horror of that day--if only because of the fact that he was Maurice Boscorelli, and stuff didn't affect him like that, like this. Faith wants to help him, but she's reluctant to. She's already spent enough nights crying her heart out.

            "They wouldn't stop falling," Bosco manages to get out. He grips his skull with tense fingers, and looks as though he wants to tear out his eyes. Faith thinks that she should get something for him: a drink or something. Anything. She doesn't want to hear this. He looks her dead in the eye.

            "You want to know where I was?" His voice is pitched high and slightly hysterical; that alone tells her that she should just get up and leave. Alarmed she tries to dissuade him from divulging any further.

            "Bosco, you don't have to--"

            "You want to know where I was? I'd stayed over at some girl's that night; I didn't even know who she was. Still don't," he takes a deep, shuddering breath; he seems calmer now. He's stopped crying. "I woke up and then there was this--this _sound. I didn't just hear it, I could feel it in my chest, you know? And all you could see out her window was smoke and fire._

            "But I was still okay," Bosco stresses emphatically. "I was still okay then. I threw on my shirt and my shoes and I was out the door. I forgot my bloody _watch_ there. It was a Timex diver's watch; really expensive shit," he breaks off with a watery laugh, rubbing his eyes. For a moment, he sounds the way he always sounds: cocky, brash, and arrogant. For a moment she wants to smile. Then he shudders again.

            "I don't remember how I got to the Towers, but one minute I was in the street, then the next I was in the Ninth Circle of Hell. The _Ninth _fucking_ Circle. I was so fucking __scared."_

            "We all were Boz," Faith says gently, trying to alleviate the guilt in his voice and to get him to stop talking. She doesn't want to know this.

            "But you _stayed," he snarls raggedly. She blinks in surprise. "You all __stayed, God damnit. __You want to know where I was? I was outside on the fucking __curb, Faith. I just couldn't take it in there; I couldn't see, couldn't breath, and it was hot, and there was all this roaring and keening--_Fuck._" He wraps his arms around his middle, rocking back and forth, and Faith wonders if he's going to be sick. Absurdly she thinks that she should get a bowl, or something, if he is going to be sick. She fights an urge to laugh hysterically._

            "I had to get out of there; it just didn't matter anymore. I didn't care who was hurt or dying, I just had to get out. So . . . I . . . Did. And I ran until I couldn't anymore. I ended up being about a block away." Bosco sounds very matter-of-fact now, and oddly distant. He doesn't seem to notice that he's started crying again. "And I just sat there. Then I looked up and all I could see were these people falling. They were the ones that had jumped out of window or been blown out from the force of the explosion, I guess. They'd just hang in the air for a moment, like bits of litter, then they'd been gone. They were falling so hard and so fast and they took forever." 

            Faith doesn't know what to say to him, so she tries the inanely obvious. "There was nothing you could have done for them." Just stop talking, she pleads silently. Just stop talking.

            "_That doesn't matter,_" he snaps. "Good God Faith, I didn't know what to _do. And I was so scared."_

            "None of us knew what to do," she reiterates, as she rubs a small scar on the back of her hand that she'd got in the Tower. "And we were all scared."

            "But you _stayed," he says raggedly. "You all stayed."_

            "But I saw you there--" Faith tries to interject, confused. But Bosco doesn't let her. 

            "I was outside. I didn't do anything. _I didn't know what to do._"

            She tries again. "We were all scared. But I saw you _there--_"

            "But _I shouldn't have been," he insists shakily. He can't seem to hear what she's trying to tell him. It's like speaking to a deaf man. "__I should have known what to do. I just sat on the stupid fucking curb and watched them fall, Faith. They clung to each other, Faith. They fucking _clung_ to each other. There were _kids_." He's crying again now, and his voice is strangled. Faith stares at the dark-haired man sitting on her couch for a moment more before moving to sit next to him. She puts an arm around his shoulders and draws him to her, resting his face in the crook of her shoulder, and rocking him back and forth as one would comfort a small child or a lover. He does not resist, and weeps desperately into her neck while reaching out a hand to clutch at her arm. His fingers pinch into her flesh. His skin sticks against her skin, glued by tears and sweat._

            "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry; Faith I--I need--Faith, _please_. Just make it _stop_," she can feel him chant this into her skin with moist breath. "Just make it stop. They were falling and falling; _they won't stop falling._" She places an uncertain hand his collarbone and slides it up to cradle his skull, meshing her fingers in his short-cropped curls. Her other hand rests on the back of his neck, splayed over the ridge of his spine and stone-soft muscles under the tender skin there. Faith presses her mouth against the top of his head in a formless kiss, and grips him a little more tightly. Full of sound and fury and signifying _nothing_--she thought suddenly. He's but a candle. He smells of salt, leather, cold night and despair, and above his head Faith locks eyes with her husband. He looks stricken, furious, hurt, and above all else tired.

- - -

            She has heard silence described as a bottomless pit, or as a drowning, or as a type of subtle death. She's heard about silences--lifeless, still things that sucked you into them like black holes; that pulled you down in the undercurrent of white-water rip tides. This, Faith knows, is a lie. Silences are not like still pools, she thinks; they're like cling-wrap. They're like sticky spun sugar, or better yet, taffy. They are soft and oh-so saccharin (they stick and cling and work their way under the skin and lie, lie, lie). But the silence, she thinks, is better than talking. If they talk, things might get said that are better left unsaid. 

            _I--Can I talk to you?_

            This is what she knows as she moves around the kitchen in the pearl-gray morning light. She pulls down three ceramic bowls with blue strips from the cupboard shelf, and places them on the table next to several cereal boxes and a jug of milk. The milk is half empty she notes, and files it away for later in the back of her mind (butter, tampons, cheese, bread, and now milk; she tallies it up in her head and frowns, shrugs, and makes sure to remember them for later, after shift). She places spoons by the bowls and glasses by the spoons. A pitcher of berry punch sits by the milk. One of the bowls has a crescent-shaped chip on its rim, marring the smooth circle of its lip. The cartoon faces on the cereal boxes grin maniacally at her as she calls the children for breakfast, staring absently at the box and wondering why it bothers her today.

            Charlie comes first, blinking and yawning, not yet quite awake. He still has his pajamas on--the red ones with the gangly cowboy puppet from Toy Story on them--and he hasn't brushed his hair yet. He pours his cereal (something sugary and brown and horrible), and dribbles a little milk on it. Charlie doesn't like milk, so he tries to get away with drinking the absolute minimum he can of it. She doesn't make him pour more milk into his cereal this morning--from which he takes heart--and, daringly, he adds more brown-colored sugar balls to his bowl. His eyes dart to her face, but Faith says nothing. She thinks; _he might as well just eat them from the box, but there is no bite to her thoughts, no drive to correct him. She is calm, and lying, lying, lying. To whom, she isn't sure._

            _I . . . I really need to._

            She, herself, doesn't have cereal. She opens the refrigerator and randomly pulls out a cup of yogurt. It's vanilla, and as she pulls the foil off, it sounds like ripping skin: moist and sharp. She rummages in a drawer for a spoon with one hand while she lays the stiff foil on the counter carefully with the other. The crinkled silver is covered in a thin sheen of milky yogurt. The film reminds her, oddly enough, of mucus. The chill plastic of the container sticks to the skin of her hand, and she can feel Charlie looking at her--scrutinizing her--but she ignores him, and stares out the window over the sink at the sky. 

            It's barely light out. The sky is a smudged sketch of an oil pastel--all soft edges and blurred lines, runny and melting like an ice-cream cone on a hot day. Its layered, wavy line upon wavy line, piled haphazardly from the angry pink of the horizon up. She thinks of sediment and the walls of the Grand Canon. 

            The color flows unsteadily from bottom to top. First a thin, thread-like strip of pink rips raggedly along the rim of the sky: binding the seam of the world. After comes that swirling pearly pink-gray that you only see in the cusp of oyster shells, outlining the darkened shapes of buildings, brushed on like blush. Then come gray, true deep gray, like the sharp wings of a dove. Then there is slate gray and slate blue; then blue-gray and smoky yellow, drifting in and out of one another like drowsy lovers. Gray-white comes next, shocking in its paleness, then peach--the color firm and ripe. 

            A strange gray-aqua, almost green, follows with the vagueness of a straggling child, then comes violet slate (almost silver) and a startling slash of charcoal. Pale blue-white, like milk, streaks messily between the darkness of the charcoal and the lighter smoke gray (so pale and insubstantial, it's almost not there) that makes up the next ragged ring. Smoke blue comes next, melting seamlessly into the final shade of peacock--rich and thrumming with color, arcing over the blackened city spires like a far-flung cloak. But for all the loveliness, she finds it's still shocking to see the layers building up in the void of the Towers along the New York skyline.

            Her own face is reflected back to her in the streaky windowpane. She examines it critically. She is a wide-jawed, high-cheeked, long-mouthed, large-eyed image, all transparent, all rimmed in palest pinkie-blue (redder, though, at her cheeks) and backlit by the kitchen lights behind her. She sees her countenance as both open and empty, and full and closed at the same time. This disturbs her, and she wonders about the paradox of the idea. She wonders if she's seeing only what she wants to see. She wishes she could ask Fred (as she always has before, but--somehow--can't now). The thought of asking Bosco rambles clumsily through her mind and stumbles over her thought of asking Fred, pulling down a chaotic mirad of things as it crashes through the brittle layers of her thoughts. 

            Suddenly it's all she can do to just not burst into tears. 

She turns away, eyes wide and blind, from the empty-full image in the watery window-glass. She turns inward to the kitchen cupboards, fingers searching mole-like for glasses before remembering that she has already put them out. 

            _I mean--_

            She hears Emily in the bathroom and looks towards the clock, faintly concerned. Lately Emily takes far too much time in the bathroom before she goes to school. There have been instances when Emily has made all of them (or sometimes only some of them, as the case may be) late for work or school or both. Faith has also been perturbed about her daughter's mode of dress recently; it was too adult, too un-Emily. The mother in her rebels against the popular sex-kitten look her daughter has adopted, just as the prepubescent in Emily feels the need to rebel against the values her mother tries to imprint on her. She ascribes it to a hormonal-teenage thing and prays that she's right. She's not too sure she can handle this Emily for the rest of her life. She puts a spoonful of the sweetly bitter yogurt in her mouth and sucks on the spoon. She moves her tongue around the small, smooth scoop of metal, pulling it against her teeth and savoring the metallic coppery taste it leaves behind, like blood.

             Emily walks into the kitchen finally, sullen and defiant and proud in turns. The young girl is wearing a skinny magenta shirt that clings unattractively to her young body, straining over the small, hard knots of her maturing breasts. Emily is still at that awkward stage, between child, girl, and woman, where she can still afford to not wear a bra, but it is fast becoming apparent that she is no longer an '_it_.' Low-riding jeans complete the outfit, revealing a pale line of (far too much, the mother thinks in dismay) milky-pink flesh between shirt-bottom and jeans-waist. 

            The clothes, by themselves, might have been mild enough that she would have let it pass, if only for the reason that she was reluctant to break the quiet of the morning. Emily, though, had clearly been feeling a greater than usual need to defy her mother. She'd smeared her lips with bright cherry-red, and outlined her eyes with black, black kohl. It made those oh-so familiar heavy-lidded eyes into something bordering on obscene in someone so young. The daughter looks at her mother with eyes that are shaped like her own and colored in Fred's honest brown, and filled with something so belligerent--so flatly resentful--that it's disconcerting to see, and she has to look away. 

            Emily tilts her chin up, and gives a glare of half triumph, half fear, and all rage. Emily, she knows, is old enough to understand what has transpired, despite the fact that she herself isn't entirely sure she understands. She feels like there has been a kind of monumental shift in the balance of the world that leaves her unsteady and uncertain. 

            _Look, I just thought we'd--I dunno. I should go. Sorry for bothering you._

            This, unlike Charlie's gentle rebellion of sugar, cereal, and milk, is something that she cannot ignore. She sucks once more on her spoon, then places it back in her yogurt, and makes a fluttering movement with her hands. She detests unnecessary gestures when speaking, and loathes that she is reduced to them. It takes her a moment to find her voice and then another to find her words.

            "Take that junk off," (one of her hands flits softly to her own face, light touching her own lips and eyes which are tingling in sympathy to her daughter's, pantomiming what she is talking about.) "All of it. You're not going to school like that." Emily's face pales and tightens with wordless fury, and she leaps up from the table and stalks sullenly into the bathroom. Fred emerges just as Emily slams the bathroom door. Charlie is staring at her silently, thoughtfully. She catches him looking at her and he glances away.

            Fred shakes his head, like a dog coming out of water or, better yet, like a bear. She thinks that this is an accurate analogy; Fred is like a bear. He gives off the feeling of height and compact power without actually being tall, or powerful. He is thick--thick muscles: thick flesh: thick features. She looks at his shoulders, his short, powerful neck and the square set of his jaw, and thinks; _like a bear, just like a bear. Her partner though, she thinks, is wiry and lithe. Bosco has a swimmer's build, with a long, lightly muscled neck and broad, sloping shoulders. For some very odd reason, Bosco has always reminded her of an otter, all long and sleek and brown and sharp. She remembers a time when she was a young child, that she had been afraid of bears. She also remembers--with knife-edge clarity--that she has always like otters. They had been her favorite exhibits at the Zoo. Her husband looks at her and she finds herself hoping that he doesn't know what she's thinking in the frail shell of her skull. She tells herself that that's stupid, that that's impossible, but she doesn't look him in the eye. She looks at him slightly off-center, slightly over his shoulder, slightly above his head. Not at him._

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I just needed-- 

Fred stares at her then like she is something strange and new and, becoming irritated, she wants to tell him to stop. She wants to say--_take a picture; it will last longer._ Instead she turns to the sink, reaching for the sponge before dropping her hand back to the counter, then reaching out again (for a water jug this time), and waters the pot of African violets on the window ledge. There is something that feels suspiciously like a lump in her throat, and she is careful to keep her eyes trained on her hands. She hears the bathroom door open, and then Charlie getting up from his seat. He puts his bowl in the sink by her wrists and shuffles from the room to dress. She can hear Emily behind her clearly; her daughter's movements are stiff with fury. Fred does not move at all, and she feels heat creep up her neck. She's angry that her body betrays her, angry that Fred's being an ass (and he _is_, she insists silently to herself), angry at Emily's myopic stoicism, and angry at the anger. She wonders why any of this should inspire anger, and wonders at the shame lurking somewhere beneath it.

            "I'll drop the kids off Faith," Fred says flatly. Normally his voice is a thick, gelatinous substance; transparent should anyone care to look through it. But when Fred feels any strong emotion his voice drops, goes level, and hardens. It becomes opaque. It becomes stone, shale. He controls his words with the ponderous precision of a blind-man picking up knives. Every word is costly. Faith raises her eyes to his, stricken, ashen: shaky in her skin. _Why_ forms like a lamentation in the back of her throat and dies still born on her lips. Her hands flutter by her sides, because for the first time in her life she is uncertain what to do with them. She almost reaches for him--to shake him, to hit him, to hold him; she isn't sure. Emily leaves the room to get her coat, shoes, and bag. She leaves her dishes on the table; cereal half eaten, juice half drunk. She stares at Fred and he stares back. 

            _I—Can I talk to you?_

            "Thanks," Faith says finally because there is nothing else to say. "I'll pick up the groceries before I come home."

- - - 

            Faith stands in the frozen goods isle, between the butter and the milk, in front of the yogurt section. One hand taps the handlebar of the grocery wagon; short, rounded nails making a clipped tattoo. _Tat, rata, tataratat, rata, tat._ She is meditating between yogurt brands and types, thinking that Charlie won't eat yogurt, Emily doesn't really care, and Fred only eats stirred. She likes the kind that comes with the fruit syrup on the bottom of the cup, thick and bittersweet and waiting to be stirred, but nobody else will eat it. She chews on her thumbnail, and stops. She reaches out to the stirred yogurt, and stops again.

            _They were falling and falling; they wouldn't stop falling._

            "Fuck it," she mutters softly and she reaches for the non-stirred yogurt: strawberry, raspberry, blackberry and blue. She picks out twenty-five of each. She hesitates, and then throws some vanilla and banana in the wagon as well. ("What the hell," she murmurs under her breath, "In for a penny, in for a pound.") She stiffens her spine and feels heat creep up her throat and suffuse her cheeks. She feels as if everybody is staring at her. No one is though, and she makes her way round the store for the rest of her items (coffee grounds, tampons, butter, cheese, bread, milk), then heads to the checkout line. 

            It's late--sometime before 2 a.m.; their shift ran long--and the line is very short. There is nobody behind her. She looks at the magazines in the racks as she waits for her turn. 

            To bide her time, she looks at the magazines; their glossy covers plastered with models airbrushed to perfection on them. It makes her think--foolishly--of Emily, her Emily, and not the alien creature that now inhabits her home. Faith wishes she could blind her child to these magazines and protect her from their articles on perfect bodies; perfect outfits; perfect boyfriends and sex. Unconsciously Faith touches her own hair, twists a short strawberry-ash strand around her index finger, and wonders if _she looked more like one of those models that maybe then her daughter would listen to her. Faith hopes not; hopes her daughter has a better character than that, and she moves up in the line. _

            Her eye catches the title of one magazine article that declares in bolded fuchsia century gothic font; "How to Know If Your Spouse is CHEATING on You," and she quickly looks away, flushing. Faith's immediately furious; she has done nothing, why the shame? _She has done nothing. Then, red with shame and anger in liberal parts, she deliberately turns back to the magazine and snatches it up, tosses it in the cart quickly. She acts as if it burns her hands, and hopes, belatedly, that no one notices._

            _Yeah I was mad; I was gonna talk to you, just not then. You didn't give me a chance._

            The cashier smiles blankly at Faith when it's her turn, her mouth a grinning, gaping bit of ragged red tissue paper; a slash of fire engine red across the blotchy, scabby, pockmarked landscape of face. 

            "Cash or credit?"

            She's in her early twenties Faith guesses as she hands over her debit card, though there is something about the other woman that might make one think she's closer to forty. The cashier's eyes are deep-set smudges of gray and black, neither young nor old nor anywhere in-between. Her brittle, child-like fingers are laden with cheap, chunky silver rings. Her teeth are stained faintly yellow from tobacco and booze, and she rings in Faith's purchases with brisk efficiency born from familiarity. It makes Faith wonder how this woman/girl got to this place. She wonders if it had been because of an absentee mother or an alcoholic father. 

            "Debit," Faith says pointlessly, holding her wallet tightly.

            The cashier never pauses (not over the thirty cans of yogurt nor the magazine) but Faith feels her breath stick stubbornly in her throat anyway. She rages that it should and thinks that she should put the stupid magazine back. But she can't because the cashier has already rung it through, and is now looking at her (with that strange, stained smile), hand poised expectantly over the gently humming register as she waits for the bill to process.

            "Paper or plastic?" She asks, heavy fingered hands resting lightly in front of her. Faith stares at her, befuddled. She feels like she has just come up from being underwater. She chokes. She gasps for language.

            _You didn't give me a chance._

            "Paper?" The girl repeats, drumming her fingers once, restlessly. "Or plastic?" Faith sees this and, startled, images of so many other girls like this cascade through her mind and crash through her thoughts, sending them whirling, spinning. They turn over, these fragmented kaleidoscope scenes, and then stop and refocus on Emily. Emily with her black-ringed eyes and red-slashed mouth, crimson and garish, like a damaged hibiscus.

            _I'm sorry, Jesus Faith. I'm sorry; they just kept falling._

            "Paper or—" The cashier begins calling out the phrase again, singsong. 

            "Plastic," Faith interrupts quickly. The cashier nods, smile fixed; eyes glazed--listless--and she starts to bag the groceries. And, oddly, Faith feels that she has just said the wrong thing.

- - - 

            Faith lies in bed, on her side, in the dark. Fred is asleep beside her, still as a stone or a dead body, on his back. He releases soft gravely gasps (almost snores), and does not move. He sleeps with a guardedness that he did not have even two nights ago. The magazine, and its titillating, shameful articles, lies in her underwear drawer like a hidden sin. She hasn't looked in it since she bought it several centuries ago. When she got home and unpacked the groceries, she felt supremely stupid for having purchased the superficial thing. She had quickly put it out of sight, and tried to forget about it. 

Can I talk to you? 

She can't sleep; she doesn't _want to sleep. It's an accumulation of things, she knows. She sits up. Faith looks back at Fred. He, as if sensing her gaze on him, turns over away from her and Faith looks away. She looks straight ahead at the dark blur of the wall and feels some nameless uneasiness grip her throat. It coils in a necklace of gilded lead around her neck, resting solidly on her collarbone. With out making a conscious decision she gets up and pulls a loose knitted wrap from the bedside chair. She shrugs it over her shoulders and quietly leaves the room._

            Emily had been in her room by the time she'd returned home--early this time, well before midnight; she'd told Christopher and Bosco that she'd been feeling sick--and Charlie had already been put to bed. Faith had stood over her son and stared down at him, at his face and the pale, strawberry-gold hair that stuck to his sleep-flushed forehead in clumps of blushing platinum. She'd had the urge to lie down next to him, and curl up around his diminutive body like a huge blanket. She'd done it before. It seemed to comfort both of them. But there was a residual feeling of filth that clung to her this time--a nagging feeling of unworthiness--that prevent her from doing what she'd done so many times before. So she'd just touched his hair. Brushing his sleep-flushed cheek with the tips of her fingers, the calluses of her hands (deep, tough, grooves worn into her skin by work and time) caught on the fine, invisible, baby-hairs that littered the rouge apple of his cheek. She reluctantly withdrew her hand and backed out his bedroom door. 

            She remembers wanting to do the same to Emily. She remembers wanting to allay some of the thoughts that were buzzing around in her head as she'd stood silently outside her daughter's door. She'd wanted to stand over Emily and see the child that she knows her daughter to still be, no matter how hard she fought it or how much she knew. Now she stands leaning against the doorframe of Emily's door, remembering the earlier thrum of angry music pulsing through the door into her bones. Faith feels tired suddenly; tired of Emily, tired of Charlie (she feels a faint twinge of guilt at this, for Charlie has done nothing), tired of Fred, tired of Bosco--tired of herself.

            _Good God Faith, I didn't know what to do. And I was so scared._

            She pushes herself up from Emily's doorframe and goes into the living room. Their living room is small, and it opens into the kitchen, which is even smaller. For a moment she mourns for the kitchen and living room she lost. She had mourned the same thing the moment she rose from the Sergeant's test knowing that she had lost it with the failing of the test. But it was a passing grief and she had moved on; forced herself to move on. The Sergeant's position would have given her family so much, she thinks. She lets it go because there is nothing else that she can do. She knows, on some level, that she blames Bosco for it--not for failing the test so much as for causing the wish in herself that she would not pass it. And that _is Bosco's fault, regrettably, she thinks staring around the living room. That is Bosco's fault._

            _Fuck I'm bad at this._

            She casts her mind back a while to Bosco weeping brokenly on her couch. She recalls his face crumpled and blanched with terror as well as tears, encircled firmly within the circumference of her arms while he shook and burrowed into her sweater-clad shoulder. It surprises her now that he chose to break down in front of her. Not that she _minds, oh no, Faith hastily adds to the mental picture of the man. Bosco is her partner. He is suppose to come to her with his troubles; he is suppose to talk to her. It promotes a healthy partnership (or so says the Chief). But things have been bad between them for so long that it'd deeply surprised her to open her door and find him standing wide-eyed in her apartment alcove. They'd talked. They'd had to. What else could they--could _she_--do? And he'd cried, bawled really; wept like a terrified newborn, and with (only a little hesitation) she'd held him to her. And then, afterwards, after all the terror, all the tears, all the fury and hurt and guilt had been aired (and she'd thought, Faith remembers suddenly, of the line from Macbeth's final soliloquy; full of sound and fury and signifying _nothing_), and afterwards she'd made them coffee. Strong coffee._

_I'm sorry, I'm sorry._

But it wasn't '_nothing'_, and that was what had been bothering her, Faith thinks lucidly in the darkling hours. It had not been _nothing. But it should have been, oh Dear Lord in Heaven, it should have been. She still remembers clearly the look she'd seen on Fred's face over the fragile curve of Bosco's shuddering back. _

More though, she remembers the feel of Bosco's hair against the skin of her chin and cheek--soft, thick and just slightly springy; like it wanted to twist into fat velvet curls but was too short. It had reminded her of an animal's pelt. He had smelt of tears and defeat. Fred had looked so--so what? She asks herself wonderingly, sliding her cool hands around her neck, tugging at the wisps of pale hair at the base of her skull.

Fred had looked so what? She asks herself. So what? It is a paradox; it is a rhetorical question and, suddenly, she finds that she doesn't really care. Sitting shivering in the big lumpy red armchair, Faith finds that she doesn't care what Fred felt or what Fred still feels or what Fred thought or what Fred still thinks. This in itself angers her because she thinks that she _should_ care. It troubles her because she knows she should. She doesn't, but she thinks she should. She knows she should. But Fred exhausts her. 

He's like a small child (she thinks in the privacy of her mind), always taking and taking and taking--though there _are times when, like a very young child, he will give up something and then act as if he has just made the greatest sacrifice of all. That's why she should care; he needs her. Not in the way that Bosco needs her--she thinks in tired, muddled relief--but he needs her nonetheless, and she resents him for it. Oh she resents him so much._

So what? _So_ what? So _what_? _So what?_

This makes her think of Bosco again. He, too, needs her; she sees evidence of it every now and again. He, unlike Fred, tries to hide his craving for comfort. She has to watch him spiral in freefall through his life, clutching at whatever precipice he can through sex and violence and control, but she sees each one crumble under his fingers before he starts falling again, and wonders when he won't be able to stop himself from falling any more. 

She wonders if then, finally, he will come to her. And she feels a strange sort of surety that in the end, when he has nothing left, he will come to her. It's not something she can explain, nor is it something that she wants to examine too closely for fear that what she finds will be too big, too, too _complicated_, too much for her to deal with. When the time comes she won't shirk and she'll confront it, whatever the cost. But not now. She knows in the deepest recesses of her heart that the cost will be great--perhaps too great.

But right not now. She won't face it now.

She sighs, presses her hands over her cheeks, feels the fine hairs like warm peach-fuzz against the hardened skin of her palms, slides them up over her eyes, and hides from herself. She laughs into her skin, and it is not a happy sound.

            _Faith, I need—I dunno. Fuck._

            She lets herself fall limp on the chair, draping herself like a piece of wet lace across the age-muted brocade of the armchair, and she pretends that she will slip through the cracks of the fabric like a particle of dust. She is waiting, blind, for something to happen. She's waiting for something to change, to explode or implode, it doesn't really matter--but she's waiting for the sky to fall about her ears and she doesn't know what to do about it.

            And she isn't at all sure that she really wants to do anything about it either.

            She huddles into her chest. She laughs again, and again, it is not a happy sound. She cradles her forehead in her hands, lacing her fingers in a lattice of flesh and blood and bone across her falsely serene brow. She sighs. She stands, and without pausing, moves fluidly, purposefully, into the kitchen.

The linoleum is chilly against the coarse skin of her feet. It feels as smooth and fresh as water on the rough, thickened flesh of her soles. Faith stops in the middle of the kitchen floor, suddenly unsure what it is she is doing. She bites her lip, wraps her arms around her middle and stares around the room. It's foreign to her suddenly, alien. She sees the violets on the window ledge, and the dish-wrack by the sink, and the tattered gray tea-towels hanging from the stove handle, and the wineglasses glinting sharply from the back of the shelf, right behind the mugs and plastic cups, and she has that sudden, horrible sense of unfamiliarity that strikes like lightening at odd moments in the lost vistas of the day. It feels like she has been displaced. Like she has been transported suddenly and against her will to another universe, and she realizes that it's been that way since she held her partner while he wept. This doesn't feel like her home anymore. Faith's hands fly to her face, resting against the now blood-flushed flesh of her cheeks in slender sheaths of cool bone and skin. She feels her throat swell. A jolt crawls down her spine, sinking claws in every second vertebra, and she feels like she's drowning.

She remembers the hard, taunt feel of Bosco's body against hers. She remembers the texture of his skin under her hands. She remembers--

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I just need-- 

Between her lips comes her breath in a hiss. She has the urge to tiptoe and be furtive, like a thief. This absurdity gives her the impulse to laugh wildly, hysterically. She can see it now. _Why yes Chief; I was the one sneaking about my house this morning. No, no, I wasn't trying to break in--I was having a moment of extreme déjà vu. She imagines Fred speaking against her, committing her, his thick face contorted in florid disbelief and fury and chagrin at having his wife, an officer, arrested. What she pretends she doesn't see, even in her imagination, is the relief, the _triumph_ in her husband's face, and the resounding knowledge that __he was right. _

_I--Can I talk to you?_

It troubles her that she is so bent on proving him not so much _wrong_ as not _right. Faith tries not to dwell on this and pulls a cup down from the shelf above the sink and goes to the fridge. One of Charlie's drawings is on it; some crayon scribble of his family. She looks at it and sees Emily standing close to Fred, with herself slightly apart from them. Charlie, himself, is in the middle, smiling his huge, black, waxy crayon grin and, Faith sees with a jolt, Bosco is standing just a little behind her, but closer to her than her husband, in an unskilled mirror of Emily and Fred's pose. She swallows, trembles, opens the fridge door and pulls out some milk. Then she turns away from the fridge and the picture. Faith pours the milk into the cup with an unsteady hand. Charlie, she knows, knows nothing but that Daddy is upset--apparently with Mommy--and that they aren't getting a big new house. He doesn't know anything._

_Faith, wait. Please. Look, I really just--need you right now. _

But there is nothing for him _to know, she thinks wildly, heart beating frantically at its cage of blood and bone and fine violet veins. There is __nothing to _know_. She is angry she should be so concerned that Charlie might know __something when there is _nothing_ to know. She is upset that she even thought of it in the first place. She is upset because now a part of her must consider, is it something? And she doesn't want to answer that question. Not right now. Possibly not ever._

Faith takes a sip of her milk, grimaces, and hesitantly leaves it on the counter. She can't rid herself of the feeling of displacement. And, strangely, some part of her doesn't want to.

_Just make it stop._

She goes back into the living room, pauses on the threshold, and then heads towards her room. Inside Fred is still asleep. He doesn't move as she stands at the foot of their bed, and she is unexpectedly furious with him--blindly, madly, thoughtlessly furious. She wants to rip the covers off him and scream in his face, _'look at me look at me look at me!'_ This doesn't make any sense to her because she doesn't know what she wants him to look at. The vicious, wistful thought, _Bosco would, slips through her teeming brain and, shamed, she turns away. She dismisses the thought with scornful disdain (trying to ignore the steadfast confidence she'd felt in the thought). Would what? Would know what she _meant_? Hell, _she_ doesn't even know what she meant. Would know what she wants him to see? Is there really anything for him to see anyway? Her eyes itch, and she rubs them, ignoring the snail tracks of sticky dampness that the gesture leaves on the back of her hand._

_I want to talk to you Faith._

Faith abruptly goes over to her dresser and rummages softly through the top drawer. Her fingers touch the slick cover of the magazine she'd bought hidden beneath her clothing, and with only a brief pause, she pulls it out. She stares at the gaudy cover, gleaming gently in the dusky light. Her eyes skip over all the other headings and stick on the word cheating. It scares her and repulses her and she can't look away. She rolls it in a tube and grips it with both hands. She looks around the room, skips her eyes over Fred, and heads to the bathroom.

They have two bathrooms in the apartment. One is in the hallway between the living room, kitchen and sleeping quarters. The other is attached to the master bedroom. It is about the size of a large closet. It holds a shower, a toilet, and a sink; the bathtub is in the larger family bathroom. The compensation for the smaller size of the master bath is that it has a lock on the door. Faith, who has never really given it any thought before, is now suddenly grateful for the privacy this feature offers. She locks the door after her as she enters. Then she turns the milk-colored plastic lid on the toilet seat down. There is a sort of fine trembling that rushes through her veins now. It's almost as if ice water has been poured into her heart and now flushes her extremities with chill and hoary frost. Gooseflesh is rising on her legs and forearms from the cold bathroom air. She ignores the cold (both internal and ex) and focuses her complete attention on the soft magazine in her hands.

The magazine is incongruous looking against the camp mid '70s floor tile and the milk-blue color of her flesh; it's as garish and out of place as a clown at a funeral. There is a spidery-legged model on the cover in a chic designer dress. Parts of her are obscured by neon font (in bold) that proclaim the various headlining articles to the world: 25 SEX MOVES to improve your sex life, how to get the BODY you really need, FALL FASHIONS for the NEW MILLENNIUM, and (this is the one that she is really interested in) how to know if your spouse is CHEATING on you. Faith licks her lips, and tries not to think about why she is doing this.

How to know if your spouse is cheating on you, page thirty-five. She turns to page thirty-five. It opens with a brief definition.

Cheating, i.e., a cheat (ch**et): _v.t._ To deceive; to defraud; to trick--_v.i_. to practice trickery; --_n._ a fraud; an imposture; one who cheats; an impostor. --Cheat'er _n._ [short for _escheat_] **

One who cheats.

_Faith I . . . Really need—you right now._

Fred looking at her over the fragile curve of Bosco's spine.__

An impostor.

It rings a cord in her chest, and she's scared and almost too eager to read the article. A small calm center in her mind finds this pathetic and scornful. The article, when she reads it, disappoints her.

It's a list of things like, "has s/he been coming home late more often," and, "does s/he take more business trips than usual lately?" Faith closes her eyes and bites down on her tongue to keep from screaming. This is not what she wants. This is not what she needs. She is relieved, in a way, but this is not want she wants. She isn't entirely certain what she wants, what she needs, but she knows that this is not it. She wants to cry. She laughs instead, and it hurts her throat and her ears. She feels opaque and intangible all at once, and it _hurts_. She likes the sound of that word, though, and rolls it around in her head. Intangible. Faith thinks, that isn't right, and looks down at her hands.

_I sat on the stupid fucking curb and watched them fall, Faith. They clung to each other._

_She_ doesn't feel intangible; what she _feels_ is intangible. Faith's not entirely clear exactly what the difference between the two is, but she knows there is one. Faith stares down blindly at the magazine clutched tightly between white-knuckle hands.

Adultery and infidelity were not things widely discussed in her household growing up. In fact, they wasn't discussed at all except in passing mention of someone they knew (Did you _hear? Jane _left_ Andrew. For a _salesman_.), or thought they did. Then, in high school, there had been Fred and no one else had ever once crossed her mind in _that_ way. And after high school, after her failed attempt at college, they'd married and that was that. She'd thought that she was unbearably happy; though now Faith is forced to consider the fact that maybe she doesn't really know what happiness feels like._

_They were falling so hard and so fast and they took forever._

She can remember, distantly, a time before Fred when her world had consisted of so much more than it did now. Faith thinks that she had been happy then, too, but there is far too much that she's uncertain about now for her to be sure about it. She remembers once, when she was young--decades ago, Faith realizes with surprise--not being complicated. There had been her Mama (an image compiled of soap-scented lawn skirts, soft, quarrelsome voice, and cracked red skin), her Poppy (a short, supine figure with hair the color of a bloody sunrise, a swift tongue and an ever swifter hand), her brother (all elbow and knees and freckles) and that had been her entire world. Right now Faith longs to become that simple again. She longs to make her world revolve around the uncomplicated idea of Fred and Emily and Charlie, and maybe even Bosco, to some extent. But Bosco is complicated, so he cannot be part of a simple world. And Faith is a rational adult. Faith knows that she cannot become simple because she is complicated. Everything's complicated; there's only an illusion of simplicity.

The bathroom is cold. Drafts have found their way through the gaps in the aging wool of her sweater. There is a tension in the air around her that Faith hadn't been aware of before. She wraps her arms around her middle and rocks slowly while she stares sightlessly at the white plaster wall in front of her. She thinks, if only I could speak. But the quiet has taken up residence in her throat now and the words will not come.

"Faith?" Fred's voice is thick with the calluses of sleep on the other side of the door. She can picture him standing there with his hand splayed against the door, looking rumpled and tired in baggy sweats. Faith stills. She opens her mouth to say, go back to bed; I'm fine, I'm happy.

_You didn't give me a chance._

But she isn't.

- - -

Faith stands by her locker. She is putting on her shirt. For a moment she isn't sure which shirt it is; her navy work shirt, or her cotton shirt from home. This scares her because never before has she been unable to separate her job-life and her home-life. She has always made sure that there is some sort of distinction between the two so she wouldn't bring the problems from one into the other. But, somehow, she can't hold them apart anymore. 

Her fingers fumble with her bag and she realizes that her shift is over; she is getting ready to go home. Her watch says that it's past midnight. Her husband and her children will be asleep in bed when she gets home.

Faith finds that she doesn't really want to go home.

Bosco comes in behind her, from the showers. His hair is wet, and it sticks to his forehead in dark clumps. His head is sleek, like the skull of an otter. He's humming softly to himself. Faith watches him from the corner of her eye. Faith tells herself she should go home; that she should go right now.

But she doesn't.

Bosco is stuffing his arms into his jacket. It's an old black leather one that looks like it should belong to an aging biker. She doesn't know where he got it; he's had it forever. Faith quickly looks away as he starts to lock up his stuff. She realizes that she has been ready to leave for some time. She shies away from thinking about what she was waiting for.

"Faith?" Bosco asks causally from behind her. She is staring blindly at the metal walls of her locker, hand poised on the frame. "You wanna grab a coffee with me, or something, to wind down?" She thinks again; _I should go home_.

Bosco's face is expectant; a sharp face with keen dark eyes and a square jaw. His hair is drying to a lighter shade of airy mahogany spikes. She tries not to think about his face weeping into the crook of her shoulder. She tells herself she is going to refuse. She tells herself she is going to go home, and she thinks--really _thinks--about going back to that vortex of resentful silence, and suddenly she's terrified. Terrified and very tired. Bosco acts like nothing has happened. He doesn't ignore it, but he treats it like it happens all the time. He treats it like it's something normal. Maybe it is. She doesn't know any more._

"I--I should get home, you know?" She says lamely. Her voice sounds dry and hoarse to her ears, like she hasn't spoken in years. Maybe she hasn't, she thinks. Maybe the silence has been there longer than she'd thought. "Fred and the kids will be in bed. I should go home." 

"But if they're all already in bed, what's an hour over coffee?" Bosco counters with a puzzled grin. She can see that he's confused, but she isn't sure what she could say to explain it to him. She isn't sure she wants to.

"Faith?" He says when she doesn't answer. It's enough to irritate Faith, and a scowl picks at her lips. She knows she should go home.

"Yeah," she says, not surprised of her answer, but despairing. "Sure."

"Great," he says. "I'll meet you out front."

But she doesn't.

- - -

Emily and Charlie are eating breakfast. Faith is cooking eggs and bacon at the stove. Fred is in the bathroom. He has not asked her where she was last night, nor why she came home so late. She's not sure whether that makes her mad, or terrifies her.

She is taking the kids to school today, and she says to them, "Eat up; you don't want to be late." She can hear Fred moving around in the bedroom. She imagines him pawing through the cabinet for mouthwash. She hasn't had a chance to tell him that they're out. She was suppose to get some last night. She forgot.

The light outside the kitchen window this morning is watery and warm. The sky is several shades of dirty pearl and rose, layered upon layer, arcing over the city spires. Faith thinks that it looks like rain. She stirs the eggs and moves some of the bacon to a plate.

"Take a rain coat," she tells Emily and Charlie. "You may need it today." 

Faith moves about the kitchen restlessly. She rinses some of the dishes in the sink and puts them in the wrack. She grabs some fruit from the fruit bowl and looks in the fridge for some lunch food. She can feel Emily's eyes boring into the back of her skull. Faith wants to say, _stop it._

She tries to concentrate on making sandwiches. She pulls out what's left of the ham, some mayonnaise, mustard, pickles, the tattered remnants of the lettuce head, and the cheese from the fridge. She also gets out peanut butter out from the cupboard, because Charlie doesn't like cheese sandwiches. She spreads out the food on the counter, and then turns back to the stove. 

She stirs the eggs again then growls in a mock drawl that thrills her son, "Back yer cart up Charlie. D'ya want ketchup with 'em?" Charlie holds out his plate, giggling, and Emily looks away. Emily, apparently, doesn't eat eggs anymore. She grabs a piece of bacon, though. Faith turns off the burner and starts to make sandwiches: peanut butter and lettuce for Charlie, ham and cheese for Emily, and, hesitantly, a ham sandwich for Fred. She spreads the mayonnaise carefully, remembering that Fred doesn't like cheese either. Like father like son.

Fred comes out of the bedroom and into the hall. She can hear him searching through the hall closet for his jean jacket. She knows this because she knows her husband. He always wears it to work, even if it looks like rain.

"Your coat--the jean one? It's hanging on the chair in the living room," Faith calls out after a moment. "By the mirror." She hears Fred grunt, and then he comes into the kitchen. She turns back to the stove, for a moment, to shovel the last few pieces of bacon onto a plate. Emily gets up from the table and leaves the room. Charlie is eating the last forkful of egg on his plate, covered in copious amounts of ketchup. Fred opens the fridge then closes it again. He looks, briefly, out the window. She takes a deep breath.

"So," she asks carefully, studiously looking down at the frying pan. "Are we okay now?" She feels Fred still behind her. He half turns to her. She half twists to look at him. Fred is standing in front of the window and she can see a transparent sickle of moon over his shoulder, hanging just above the horizon, belly scraping the city top.

"I don't know." He says quietly. "Are we?" Charlie is slurping back his orange juice. His hand darts for the last piece of bacon on the plate. He looks longingly at the clock. Faith, distracted, stares after Fred as he moves out of the kitchen. She doesn't know what to say. She has become one of those women that mother warn their daughter about. She feels stupid and cruel and terrible. 

And in that moment, Faith knows that she loves Fred, and that she hates Fred, and she isn't sure she can live without him, but she isn't sure she can live with him either. She isn't certain that she wants to be without him, and she isn't certain that she would know how to be without him, even if she isn't sure how to be with him. She puts down the frying pan and turns the last burner off. The front door closes. Her eyes feel sore, and the back of her throat bruised with all the words trapped there. Faith turns back to counter and the sandwiches. She finishes--Emily's and Charlie's--and puts the beginnings of Fred's back in the fridge. 

"Go get dressed," she tells Charlie. He nods, slips down from his chair, and leaves the room without a word. Faith rests her hands on the ledge of the sink and stares out the window. She thinks she could have said something, and wonders what it would have been. She pretends that she knows what she should have said.

"Are you driving us?" Emily asks from behind her, voice rife with vague hostility. Faith sees her own face in the streaky glass of the window. It's gray and tired, like the sky outside. She can see Emily behind her. She can see Emily's face superimposed over her own face in the window: young, arrogant and knowing.

"Yeah," Faith says. "Your lunch is on the counter." Emily's lip curls, and Faith can see her begin mixing the acid of a protest. She can almost hear Emily saying, _I don't need a lunch._ She just wonders if Emily would be daring and add, _made by you, and she feels her chest tighten and burn._

"I'm going to get dressed," she says, cutting her daughter off before she can begin an answer to Faith's wonderings. "We'll be out the door in ten."

- - -

Faith is in her room. She is getting dressed. She pulls on a long sleeved cotton shirt and jeans. She pulls her hair back in a low ponytail. She is ready to go. But she finds that she is also waiting. 

She is waiting for something to come and drive her out of the complacency that she feels mired in. She is waiting for someone to shake her and make her wake up. 

She is waiting for the moment when she will get up one night and get dressed, and leave as Fred watches her. As he has always been watching her. His face is always wary, waiting for the moment when she will close the door behind her. 

- - -

Disclaimer: I own nothing except the hair on my head. Literally.

Author's note:

            Not . . . bad, I guess. Well, not too bad anyway. This, FYI, is immediately post-"Falling" (the next morning to be precise), and directly--to the point of overlapping--pre-"the Greater Good" (hopefully some of you will recognize the second-to-final scene). Now, I want to clear some things up. 

First, the italicized lines you find sprinkled throughout the first few sections are, of course, Bosco's dialogue from "Falling" when he's talking with Faith in her living room . . . with a little judicious rewriting by yours truly (to tell the truth, I couldn't remember their exact conversation, and I couldn't find any transcripts on-line, so I just made it up as I went along). The other thing that I would like to note right here and now is that this is the revised addition. In the original (which, incidentally, I have kept posted as the second chapter to this ficlet and which you do not need to read unless you're interested in extremely poor/hurried/confusing grammar) I did not have that nifty little scene from "Falling" tacked sloppily onto the top of this story. 

What I decided while I was doing the revision was that it wasn't really very clear what was going on in the story itself, so I added on the scene of Bosco's breakdown to the beginning of this. Of course, I had not seen "Falling" for several months when I wrote it, and once I saw the rerun of it on A&E, I realized that there were several . . . err . . . _discrepancies about it. I apologize, but I really _did_ need to take some artistic license with that particular scene (for the rest of the story) that would have prevented the story from working logically without it. Also, I bet some of you have noticed that I've changed the appearance of Charlie (drastically) and Emily (to a lesser extent). Again, I beg poetic license._

Also, tell me what you like better. Bosco-breakdown scene in or out of story? I need to know.

Second, I was formerly known as Ophelia, but have since changed my name to Darkwaters. What'cha gonna do? Several people were already using Ophelia. Darkwaters wasn't. Hence my line of reasoning. 

And Third I want to stress that, while I am a (major) F/B shipper, I like exploring some of the less . . . romantic angles of their relationship. Namely the fact that Faith _is married, and that any feelings she could have for him would be considered a form of infidelity. But (and I hope that people noticed) I also tried to stress the fact that Faith was confused and angered (a bit of a twist from the norm, eh?) by those feelings. Faith and Bosco's relationship is unique in it's width and flow. I've tried to capture some of that, but I also wanted to try and explain that I honesty don't belive in the "I Love You" solution. I'm fairly certain that being attracted to a person doesn't make them soul mates, but I could be wrong. You never know._

But that isn't what I want to discuss right now. Faith loves Fred. She does. I will not argue that point so don't bother trying to say that it's not true because I will ignore anything on that subject. And just remember, just because I belive that doesn't mean that I like Fred. I don't. In fact, I hate him and was really hoping that'd he'd die. He didn't, hasn't, but there's always later on. Bum ticker and all that. But she cares about Bosco, and this troubles her because she has to explain to the people around her why she spends more time with her partner than she does with her husband. There is bound to be conflict there.

_But_, she also likes Bosco. I mean like-like. More conflict ensues. Does Faith love him? Probably. Is she in Love with him? Uncertain. Will she actually burst into tears and fall into his arms and weep that she has always Loved him? Highly unlikely. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, I'm just saying that it's not very likely to happen. Not right away, anyway. I like romance just as much as the next person, but I don't write romance like that. I can't. I write the Antilove story. Don't read me work if you want a happy ending. I really don't deliver.

More than that, though, I really wanted to show the breakdown of her relationships via a lack of communication. I tired (subconsciously, at least) to parallel how the breakdown of her and Fred's marriage, and her and Bosco's partnership were by the inability to speak clearly about what they want and don't want. She and Emily also suffer from that same malady, and while Faith can see what's happening, she really doesn't know what to do about it. She's resentful, and she's unhappy, and she has absolutely no idea what to do. I think I got a tiny bit of that in this story . . . And I think that I've just written another one here in the author's note.

Sigh.

But, on the bright side, if you've read this far then that means that you at least a little interested in my thought. So I want you to know this. I thank you for putting up with my crap, and hope that you will either review or e-mail me with your own thoughts on the subject.

            Thank you for reading,

                                    D.

"**Silence (s**i**[CA1] -lens) _n. stillness; quietness; calm; refraining from speech; muteness; dumbness; secrecy; oblivion; --__interj. be quiet!: --__v.t. to cause to be still; to forbid to speak; to hush; to calm; to refute; to gag; to kill. --_****si'lent _a_. free from sound or noise; indisposed to talk; unpronounced, as a vowel or consonant. [L. _silentium]."_**

_            'definition of silence'_

_            --webster's home and office dictionary_

* * *

[CA1]


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